A communication network may facilitate an exchange of information between network devices. For example, a personal computer connected to a network might transmit data to another personal computer that is also connected to the network. Some networks transmit data in the form of packets created and processed in accordance with a protocol. Moreover, with some protocols it may be important to maintain the order of information being exchanged (e.g., a series of packets might need to be transmitted and/or received in a particular order). Also note that some network devices include multiple processing elements, and an operating system might dynamically schedule multiple threads (e.g., associated with various application and/or network connections) to be executed on the processing elements.
As networks physically support increased data transmission speeds, more efficient packet processing methods and systems may become desirable. For example, it might be advantageous to support an efficient transmission of in-order data from a network device, even when the device is able to execute different threads and/or applications using different processing elements and/or network connections.